Gehry-designed Guest House on the Road AgainStar Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)March 03--Come spring the Winton guesthouse will be on the road again. And for $1 million or so, it could roll up your driveway. Designed by Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, the award-winning three bedroom home -- which looks like a cluster of minimalist sculptures -- was moved in 2011 from a hill overlooking Lake Minnetonka to a field outside Owatonna. On May 19 it will be auctioned by ...

02/27/2015

Wainwright: Google's New Headquarters is a Futuristic GreenhouseGuardian WebThe future of work, according to Google, will take place in woodland glades and wildflower meadows, next to trickling streams and verdant allotments, among bike paths and yoga classes and gushing fountains, with fresh produce on tap. It will be a pastoral utopia-with-WiFi, all safely swept beneath a series of gigantic glass tents. Silicon Valley’s mother of all tech companies has today ...

03/03/2015

Christopher Hawthorne: Google's New Headquarters Design Takes Transparency to New LevelsLos Angeles Times (CA)March 03--As an architect, what do you give the company that has everything? More to the point, what do you design for the company that is everywhere, that has become digitally ubiquitous? If you're Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels, the rising-star architects tapped to design the new Google headquarters in Mountain View, you begin by covering all of your bases, philosophical, practical and ...

03/01/2015

Oliver Wainwright: The Forgotten Architectural Masterpieces of African ModernismGuardian (UK)Afield of triangular roofs pokes up above the horizon on the outskirts of Dakar, like a forest of wigwams that have been baked to stone under the scorching sub-Saharan sun. They sit on a triangular concrete plinth, from which bigger triangular pavilions protrude, accessed by flights of triangular steps from the dusty streets, along which triangular gutters jut out. It could be Toblerone Town, ...

02/24/2015

John Gallagher: New Windows, New Life for Derelict Michigan Central Station?Detroit Free Press (MI)Feb. 24--The derelict Michigan Central Station, an object of fascination for gawkers and dreamers alike, may rank as the building with the most broken windows of any ruin in Detroit. But that may be changing with Chamberlain Glass & Metal of St. Clair reaching agreement with the Moroun family that owns the landmark to produce replacement windows. New windows would mark a major step forward for ...

02/28/2015

Blair Kamin: New Chicago Tower by Solomon Cordwell Buenz Skillfully Deals with Challenging SiteChicago Tribune (IL)Feb. 28--So many historic buildings in Chicago are being turned into hotels these days that it almost comes as a surprise to see a new hotel stretch into the sky. The glass-sheathed, 50-story Loews hotel and apartment tower, whose hotel portion opens Monday, turns out to be a welcome addition, though it lacks the sort of eye-grabbing shape that turns up in silhouette renditions of the skyline. ...

02/27/2015

Inga Saffron: Redesigning Playgrounds to Promote "Loose Play"Philadelphia Inquirer (PA)Feb. 27--Given the ice crust encasing our streets right now, this might seem to be a strange moment to ponder what makes a good playground. A kid is lucky to gulp a few breaths of fresh air in the minutes between school and home. It feels as if it will be months before the slides are warm enough to touch again. When the thaw does come, as it inevitably will, most children will race out to the ...

02/26/2015

John Gallagher: Detroit Blight Removal Needs More MoneyDetroit Free Press (MI)Feb. 26--Detroit's blight removal efforts could face a financial bottleneck later this year unless a new source of money is found to continue it, Mayor Mike Duggan said this morning. Speaking at the Detroit Regional Chamber's annual Detroit Police Conference at MotorCity Casino Hotel, Duggan said the city has enough money through federal funding to run its blight removal demolition program ...

02/19/2015

Seattle May Cap Rents on Some Micro Apartments at $618 a MonthSeattle Times (WA)Feb. 19--These days, most Seattle apartments rent for at least $1,000 a month. Some are much pricier. But a bill under consideration by the City Council would establish a cap of about $600 a month for some of the city's smallest rental homes. The new cap would apply only to micro-apartments -- which officials have rebranded as "small efficiency dwelling units" -- priced to satisfy the terms of ...

02/24/2015

Architect of Record Named for New University of Iowa Museum of ArtGazette (Cedar Rapids, IA)Feb. 24--IOWA CITY -- A highly-anticipated permanent replacement for the University of Iowa's flood-devastated Museum of Art building now has an architect on board. Project developer H+H Development Group of Iowa City has identified BNIM Architects of Des Moines and Kansas City as "architect of record" for the new museum, the university announced Monday. The firm was chosen, in part, for its ...

02/26/2015

3D-printed Cities: Is this the Future?Guardian WebThe words “we print architecture’s future” adorn the wall of a showroom on the outskirts of Suzhou, a rapidly urbanising city in eastern China. Arranged around the room are samples of odd-looking concrete wall of varying thickness. Outside, across the car park of this otherwise unremarkable industrial estate, is a grand, neoclassical mansion that recently became a global internet sensation. It ...

02/21/2015

First New Eichler Home in Decades has Already SoldLos Angeles Times (CA)Feb. 21--A Palm Springs home built using Joseph Eichler's original blueprints is under contract to sell for $1.29 million. The newly built Modernist design, considered the first true Eichler home developed in 40 years, came to market on Tuesday. According to real estate brokers and developers Troy Kudlac and Ross Stout of KUD Properties Inc., which handled the listing side, it sold that day ...

02/24/2015

Wainwright: Wild Designs and Fierce Opposition to New Bridge in LondonGuardian WebThere are waterfalls and go-faster striped cycle lanes, funhouses and fairy lights, as well as a handful of odd things to which no words can do justice. A diverse assortment of 74 designs has been unveiled for a new bridge across the Thames, to span the river from Nine Elms to Pimlico in southwest London, providing a “distinctive gateway” to this rapidly changing part of the city. “We want not ...

02/24/2015

Billionaire Peter Sperling Sells 1920s EstateLos Angeles Times (CA)Feb. 24--Peter Sperling, son of University of Phoenix founder John Sperling, has sold a Montecito estate formerly owned by actress Jane Seymour for $10.5 million. Designed by architects William A. Edwards and Joseph Plunkett and completed in the late 1920s, the 3.34-acre compound contains a 4,904-square-foot main house, a guesthouse, a pool house, a caretaker's cottage, a tennis court, a pool ...

02/22/2015

Ray Bradbury Home's Destruction by Thom Mayne Has LA Re-examining its HistoryAssociated PressLOS ANGELES (AP) — It was the house where Ray Bradbury wrote "Something Wicked This Way Comes," and when the bulldozer came to knock it down literary scholars and preservationists were aghast. The bright yellow home with the big bay windows where the author lived and worked for 54 years wasn't the first Los Angeles landmark to be flattened of course. The statuesque Ambassador Hotel, where ...

02/19/2015

The Best Designs of 2014: Texting Cows, Life-saving Toilets, Selfie Buildings, and MoreGuardian (UK)One is the ultimate vanity project, the other processes excrement – yet both have been hailed as designs of the year. The former is a billion-euro building of such complexity that new machines had to be invented to twist glass in the previously unimaginable ways it required. This is Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, a building as lavish and precisely tailored as the handbags on ...

02/19/2015

Frank Gehry Will Design Interiors for New Facebook Office in SeattleSeattle Times (WA)Feb. 19--Four years after opening a small engineering office in Seattle, Facebook now has more than 500 employees in the city. The update came from Paul Carduner, head of the Seattle office, during a news event Wednesday. "We love it here. We're here to stay," he said. Facebook scheduled the event before word leaked out that would cement that stay: The company plans to relocate the Seattle ...

02/20/2015

Blair Kamin: Obama Designates Historic Pullman District as City's First National MonumentChicago Tribune (IL)Feb. 20--It's understandable if Chicagoans are skeptical about President Barack Obama's designation of the historic Pullman factory district as the city's first national monument. Thursday's ceremony can't change the fact that Pullman sits some 15 miles from downtown, far from the glitter of Millennium Park, and is flanked by violence-plagued neighborhoods like nearby Roseland. Even so, it ...

02/22/2015

Inga Saffron: Italian Bankers Row in PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia Inquirer (PA)Feb. 22--In the late 19th century, when thousands of Italian immigrants were pouring into South Philadelphia to make their fortunes, Seventh Street was transformed into a bustling bankers row. By 1897, there were 25 rowhouse-size banks between Bainbridge and Washington Avenues, all competing to provide newcomers with loans, money transfers, even railroad and steamship tickets. The immigrant ...

02/19/2015

Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects Unveil First Houston Project in Twenty YearsHouston Chronicle (TX)Feb. 19--Share A New York-based architecture firm responsible for some of the most iconic buildings in Houston has designed its first project here in nearly 20 years for a prime piece of property in the heart of Montrose. The seven-story, 34-unit midrise building designed by Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects was envisioned with floor-to-ceiling glass and undulating curves. Plans include ...

02/19/2015

Pei Cobb Freed's $680 Million Super Luxury Boston Tower Moves AheadThomson Reuters ONEBOSTON, MA - February 19, 2015 - HFF announced today that is has arranged construction financing and joint venture equity totaling $680 million for the 61-story Four Seasons Hotel & Private Residences One Dalton Street, Boston, the tallest building to be constructed in New England since the early 1970s. HFF worked on behalf of Carpenter & Company, Inc. to secure the $500 million construction ...

02/19/2015

Schumacher: Great Architecture Needed for New Milwaukee Bucks ArenaMilwaukee Journal Sentinel (WI)Feb. 19--Amid the debates about a new downtown arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, one question remains largely untouched: Will we get great architecture? Nothing will define the project -- and its impact on Milwaukee -- like the design. Peter Feigin, the Bucks' new president, recently said he'd like the multipurpose arena, expected to cost between $400 million and $500 million, to look like it ...

02/20/2015

Historic Handicraft Guild Building in Minneapolis May be Repurposed by DeveloperStar Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)Feb. 20--Village Green and Pratt Ordway Properties are proposing an 18-story apartment tower at the corner of 10th Street and Marquette Avenue S. in downtown Minneapolis, less than a block off Nicollet Mall and atop the historic Handicraft Guild building. The developer is proposing to tear down two of the existing, low-slung buildings and repurpose the 108-year-old Handicraft building, facing ...

02/18/2015

Alex Andreou: Anti-homeless Metal Spikes and Hostile Architecture Toward the DestituteGuardian (UK)More than 100 homeless people are “living” in the terminals of Heathrow airport this winter, according to official figures – a new and shameful record. Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have warned that homelessness in London is rising significantly faster than the nationwide average, and faster than official estimates. And yet, we don’t see as many people sleeping rough as in previous ...

02/18/2015

Make It Right Foundation and Six Kansas City Firms Design Contemporary Housing PrototypesKansas City Star (MO)Feb. 18--In 2013, Kansas City set out to transform the abandoned and decrepit Bancroft Elementary School into beautiful apartments, complemented by ultramodern apartment buildings next door. Now, the neighborhood is headed to the next level. Six local architecture firms are teaming up to bring the same revival to a model block in the Historic Manheim Park neighborhood, mixing sleek ...